


Glowing Profanities & Keeping Up Disappearances

by frenchpirate (Whiskey_n_speed)



Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Childhood Memories, M/M, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whiskey_n_speed/pseuds/frenchpirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Pete expected the least from this year's new years party, was to run into his old best friend who had moved across the country about six years ago. He's adaptable to changes of events, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glowing Profanities & Keeping Up Disappearances

”It is _on_ , Wentz” 

“Joe, it’s too early for shots” Pete sighed, not getting up from his friend’s couch that he was currently splayed out on, staring occasionally at the clock on the wall. If was _definitely_ too early for drinking games, no matter what Joe said.  Joe, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, was grinning widely and holding too many shot glasses in each of his hands. Pete kind of expected him to drop at least half of them before they actually got around to drinking anything out of them. 

“It’s new year’s eve” he argued, and waved around with his hands. Pete flinched slightly, mostly in fear of being hit by a flying glass if Joe suddenly had less control of his motions than he thought he had. It was very possible. 

“It’s two in the afternoon. No shots yet.” He knew that if he didn’t make a decision right now on behalf of both of them, they’d be wasted before any of the other guests even arrived. He cringed at the memory of Patrick dragging him home last year, telling him he was an idiot, and Pete was totally an idiot, but he was an idiot who’d won the annual game of ‘tequila and whatever fruits (or vegetables) we have left when we’re out of lemons’. It was kind of an achievement, though Patrick just rolled his eyes at him when he mentioned it. 

“Not with that attitude” Joe sneered before going back into the kitchen and putting down the glasses. Pete couldn’t help but snicker when he heard the sound of at least one glass being dropped and breaking against the tiles. He didn’t say anything though; he just shifted on the couch so he was upside down, head hanging over the edge of the cushions and feet up on the backrest, before pulling out his phone and texting Patrick when he’d be there. 

It took like twenty minutes before his phone vibrated against his thigh, since Patrick wasn’t as physically attached to his phone as Pete was. ‘ _an hour and a half tops. still gotta pick up a couple of ppl’  
_

 _‘k. bring sparklers too’_ he sent back, within less than ten seconds. Whatever, they could say what they wanted about his phone issues, but he was at least kind of reliable when it came to communication. It could take like two days for his friends to reply. 

_‘ur a child.’_ Pete could imagine Patricks expression so vividly that it was almost like he was right in front of him, raised eyebrows but a tiny smile at the edge of his mouth, because he was _so_ going to bring Pete sparklers.

*

It took them more like two hours to arrive, and by that time the first guests had already showed up, and Joe had slipped out the shot glasses and drinking game talk again, this time with a lot more success among his intended participators. It was all familiar faces from all kinds of places he’d been spending time at throughout his entire high school career, classes, sports teams, horrible bands, parties and even a few old hookups that he didn’t really want to think about. 

Most of them had retreated to a circle around the dining table where they cheered and downed tequila like there was no tomorrow, while Pete and a few other guests held back a little.  He had a beer in his hand when Patrick arrived, and he flung himself at him like they hadn’t just seen each other two days ago. It was a ritual; it had to be that way. 

“I got your sparklers” Patrick said and handed him a small box and Pete loudly pecked a kiss on his cheek. They had known each other since the beginning of high school, and Pete made sure that a day didn’t go by where he didn’t assure Patrick of their friendship. God would know that the both of them needed it from time to time. 

“Do you want to light them with me?” he asked grinningly, and Patrick shook his head, but Pete had kind of expected that. Patrick always had a hundred things to do, besides taking part in Petes lame ideas. So he put the sparklers in his pocket for now and went back to the dining room.  
  
*

At six, Joes place was _packed_. Just moving from the kitchen, through the living room and into the dining table where the tequila game (now with tomatoes in lack of lemons, gross yeah, but it wasn’t the worst they’d come up with through the years) was still going strong, could take a good fifteen minutes, with several encounters with other peoples drinks or sweaty backs and armpits or drunk friends yelling cusswords at him. Sometimes Pete thought that if he hadn’t always been drunk at parties he would’ve absolutely despised them. Luckily, he usually was, so he was having a pretty good time.

 

As far as good times go, he still needed some fresh air once in a while, because the air was warm and damp and because he was _him_ , and Joes tiny balcony that was packed with smokers who never talked about anything but smoking and cigarettes and occasional weed (he would probably smoke if it wasn’t because the average smoker annoyed him greatly) didn’t seem like the ideal place he wanted to be. So, he made his way down the staircase and out onto the street, where fireworks were already filling the air, though not as much as they would later on. He stood there by a lamppost for a while, leaning against the cold metal and shivering in his thin hoodie, looking up at the sky and listening to the music from various apartments in the complex mixing together like some big blurry tune. It didn’t take long before he was interrupted.

 

“Pete? Pete _Wentz_?” someone asked, a voice that he vaguely recognized, deep in the back of his mind. It took him a while to place it, longer than it did for the person speaking to step out behind the shadows of the tree they’d been leaning on, and reveal themselves underneath a streetlight. 

Pete immediately felt the biggest grin he could muster spread on his face as he recognized the guy standing in front of him, and it was like a tiny flash of heat spread in his chest as a string of memories from sometime between middle- and high school went through his head. It went too fast and was too much of a blur for him to actually remember any of them clearly. It was more as if he remembered the warm feeling of summer and smiling a lot. 

“Mikey?” He sounded a little disbelieving, because it was at least six years since they’d last seen each other and Pete had maybe kind of forgotten that there was a possibility for them seeing each other ever again. “What are you doing in _Chicago_?” 

He looked like himself though, Mikey, he was tall (ever taller than Pete remembered, dammit) and lanky and his hair was weird but oddly fitting with his glasses that was settled on the edge of his nose. When he thought about it, Pete hadn’t really changed a lot either, especially not his height. “I’m moved back here for college. Missed the mid-western winter” 

There was a tiny twitch at the edge of his mouth, and Pete didn’t need any more to know he was kidding. He hurried over and gave Mikeys shoulder a friendly punch, and Mikey sent him a careful smile. 

“You fucker. It’s good to see you again” he grinned and he meant it. Mikey had moved back to Jersey shortly after he turned fourteen, after a few years of being absolute inseparable  best friends with Pete, and Pete had been excessively bummed out for a long time, but then he’d started high school and met Patrick and now they were here. “So what have you been doing?”

“The usual, I guess. I finished high school, did worse than I could have, didn’t get accepted into my first priority college half an hour from my parent’s house. So I came here” he explained briefly. “What about you? Anything cool happened?”

Pete had to go through his mind to remember if he’d actually accomplished anything worth sharing in the last couple of years, and he hadn’t really, so he decided to just sum up like Mikey did. 

“Passed high school, barely, played a lot of soccer, played in a lot of shitty bands, now I work at Home Depot. Kinda lame, really” 

“Not lamer than Jersey, trust me” Mikey smiled genuinely, and Pete shrugged. 

“I’ve got sparklers, though” he said and gestured towards his pocket. It kinda came out of nowhere, but Mikey just grinned at him and nodded. 

“Sparklers are cool”

*

And just like that, it was like they were 13 years old again, it was like they clicked right back into their old routine about being as immature and annoying as possible, even though there was a huge gap in between now and then, where they had both done all kinds of important teenage things that they’d thought they were going to do together, but ended up doing in each their city on their own. But this felt nice and familiar, and Pete suspected that even though they hadn’t seen each other for so long, not much was different, especially not the way they’d been friends. 

Party, gross tequila shots and sweaty bodies long forgotten, they sat in the snow with their backs against the tree outside Joes building, only kind of drunk, drawing obscene words in the air with the tips of the sparklers and reading them out loud to each other. 

“Cunthole” Mikey read while Pete thought about the first time he’d met Mikey. It had been at a summer camp when they were ten and Pete had been an annoying little brat, who’d gone over and told Mikey he had weird knees, and Mikey hadn’t really gotten mad, he’d just told Pete back that it looked like he was wearing girls jeans and then they hung out for the rest of the camp, past the point of insulting each other and doing their best to give everyone else hell. “You can do better” 

“Dicksquad” Pete giggled. In the summertime, they had dragged tents into Petes garden several times and camped out behind his moms flower bushes, and they had looked at the stars and gotten tired of that pretty fast and decided to sneak out of the garden and run around in the neighborhood in the middle of the night, climbing the trees that leaned out over the fences of other people’s front yards and sitting there like kings of the suburbs. “You can too, really”

“Fucksock.” Mikey said in between breaths filled with laughter. Pete liked his laughter, it wasn’t a thing he’d heard that often back when Mikey had lived in Chicago, he didn’t laugh a lot of those full, loud laughs that Pete did almost all the time, and now he’d gone for so long without even hearing him talk, and he figured that he’d kind of missed it. A lot really. They’d lost contact after Mikey moved back to Jersey, and hadn’t talked since then. It was kind of magic that they just happened to be at the same New Year’s party in the same town so long time after. Pete was kind of amazed, at least. “That’s creative” 

“I have an extended vocabulary when it comes to stuff like this” 

“You have an extended vocabulary all the time, if I remember it right”

“But especially when it comes to this” Pete stated, which was accompanied really badly by the fact that he’d couldn’t really come up with anymore words. And then his sparkler burnt down before he had a chance of thinking of more profanities to spell out, and he reached for another one, only to find the pack empty. He had guessed there was at least half of them left, but apparently they’d been out here for longer than he expected. “We’re out of sparklers” he stated with a frown, and Mikey looked at him and then down at the box. 

“That sucks. Don’t you have more inside?” 

“No. Patrick got these for me” Pete explained and made a vague motion towards the house at the mention of Patricks name, though Mikey probably didn’t know who he was. “We should go get some more” he said then, and looked hopefully over at Mikey who’s lips turned upwards as he nodded. 

“Totally. Is there a corner store anywhere near this place?” 

“I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough”

*

They ended up walking for at least half an hour, shaking in the cold weather and almost slipping on the icy ground a couple of times, but none of them really noticed because in the meantime they caught up on pretty much everything that had happened in between that summer where Mikey’s dad had gotten a promotion that required him back in Jersey, and then now. 

Pete told a lot about Patrick, just as he had barely talked about anything else than Mikey through the first half year of high school, and Patrick had probably gotten majorly tired of him within two weeks tops, and he told about some of the shows he’d played and how he almost crashed his car once, and how he was in the process of starting a new band and how he fell down from a street sign he’d climbed onto once while he was drunk and broken a leg. 

And Mikey told about his first girlfriend, and his brother who had just finished art school and was doing really well, contrary to how he’d been when they lived in Chicago, and Mikey seemed really happy about that so Pete beamed back at him, and then he told about sneaking out and fucking up and getting caught and being stupid, and even though Pete considered his teenage memories as good ones that he wouldn’t have done that much differently if he could, he still felt a little bit of wishing that Mikey hadn’t moved away and they’d gotten to do all this together. 

And suddenly they were standing in front of a Walmart that still had an hour left before closing, and they quickly went inside and bought some sparklers, and the besides the packs that they paid for they also both stuffed a pack inside their hoodies, just for good old stupidity’s order, and exchanged tense and knowing looks as they went through the checkout, without getting caught as smoothly as if had been yesterday they’d been doing this the last time.

 

When crossing the Walmart parking lot as they headed back towards Joes place, Pete spotted an abandoned shopping cart that was parked halfway in some bushes that surrounded the asphalt field. 

“Mikey, _look_ ” he uttered eagerly and grabbed Mikeys wrist and pulled him towards the lonely cart. “If I sit in this will you push me home” 

“No way” Mikey said and shook his head excessively, clinging on to the boxes of sparklers that Pete had made him carry. Then a grin spread on his face. “I’ll push you halfway and then you push me the rest of the way”

“You suck. I’m small, I can’t push you” 

“I’m skinny, I can’t push you either” Mikey shot back while Pete climbed into the cart anyways. 

“We’re both weaklings. Now push me and I’ll push you afterwards” Pete said and Mikey handed him all the sparklers before wrestling the cart free of the bushes and steering it across the parking lot. 

“You’re heavy” Mikey said breathlessly, almost inaudible underneath a huge explosion of firework right above them. None of them really had any idea what time it was, though there couldn’t be more than a couple of hours until midnight. 

“It’s muscle” Pete snickered and lit a sparkler. 

“Totally. You’d have to be the most muscular weakling I’ve ever seen”  

“Well I am one of a kind. Speed up a little”

 

And Mikey did, and it took them remarkably shorter to get halfway home with Pete in the cart, feet dangling over the edge and sparkler waving in the air, giving Mikey directions that Mikey did everything not to follow. And when they passed an huge tree that was about halfway, Mikey tipped the cart so much that Pete almost fell out and made a high-pitched noise. 

“Get out” Mikey laughed. “My turn” 

“Okay, but don’t burn all the sparklers. I want some left for midnight” Pete said and Mikey nodded before climbing into the cart, really ungracefully, but he also had a lot longer limbs than Pete, most of his legs hung over the edge and he could almost reach the ground if he stretched a little.

 

Maybe Pete wasn’t completely wrong when he said he was all muscle, or maybe Mikey was just the lightest person in existence, because Pete could keep a much higher tempo than Mikey while pushing the cart, and the sparkler in Mikeys hand turned into long burning lines in the night sky. 

“That looks really cool” Mikey stated when they were only a couple of blocks from Joes place. 

“Yeah, we should do this more often, y’know, now that you live here” 

“What? Drive around in a shopping cart at night waving sparklers around” Mikey said with a huffing laugh, and Pete shrugged as much as he could while moving. 

“When you put it like that-“  

“No, I mean, I’m totally up for that” he cut in, and Pete grinned to the back of his head, and though he couldn’t see it he knew that Mikey smiled too. “I don’t know anyone else who’d suggest that” 

And Pete didn’t either, which was something he’d pretty quickly figured that he’d missed a whole lot about Mikey. Patrick was his best friend, no doubts about it, Patrick would cuddle him when he was sad and tell him to go to sleep when he was having a particular bad wave of sleeplessness and stop him when he was about to do something really stupid, and sure Joe would get high with him and jam with him occasionally, but Mikey was a whole different category of friend. Mikey had quietly sneaked around him when he was throwing an anger fit back in the days, slipping stuff to him that he guessed would have some sort of positive effect on him, everything from sugary snacks to small stickers or a guitar pick, and he’d stayed up with him through long and hard nights, talking to him though he barely could keep his eyes open himself, and when Pete got really, really dumb ideas that would probably end in various injures and other damage (mostly on himself though, but still) Mikey was the first one to encourage him, and immediately follow his lead.

And with the thought of all this, while moving loudly and lighted through the night, Pete really didn’t feel twenty years old.

*

When Pete clumsily parked the cart in front of the front door to the apartment complex that Joe lived in, with a giggling Mikey still slouching inside it, they were pretty quickly greeted by Patrick and Andy who looked kind of annoyed. Pete quickly ran through his mind for possible things he could’ve done to piss them off but didn’t find anything at the top of his head. 

“We got kind of worried, it’s been like an hour and a half. Where’ve you been?” Patrick demanded to know, and shot Pete a sort of indulgent look. Then he looked at Mikey in the cart, quietly eyeing the remains of a sparkler burning out in his hand. “Mikey?”

“Wait, you know Mikey?” Pete asked disbelievingly. 

“Um yeah, sort of, I know some of his classmates, he was one of the people I picked up on my way here. _You_ know him?” Patrick looked a little confused between Mikey and Pete. “Well obviously you do-“ 

“’Trick, this is Mikey that I told you about, from middle school” Pete clarified. 

“Oh my _god_ ” Andy chimed in from his spot beside Patrick. “That’s him?” 

“Yeah. We were at Walmart. We picked up more sparklers” 

“And a shopping cart” Mikey added and gestured towards the cart he hadn’t bothered to get out of yet. 

“You two are unbelievable. Come on in, it’s freezing out here and it’s not long until midnight”

“And there’s still more beer, right?” Pete asked cautiously before helping Mikey out of the cart and following Patrick and Andy inside. He’d have to make sure; he knew how it went when Joe and his friends were in the house. 

“Plenty” 

“Awesome”

*

As the clock ticked closer to midnight, people started pairing up and dancing closer and it was almost high school all over again, considering the importance of having a new year’s kiss. Pete didn’t have one, he would’ve had one if he hadn’t been a dick towards his last ex as much as she’d been a bitch towards him, but that was how life went, and it sucked now and then. But it wasn’t the end of the world, so he hung out around the kitchen, already having opened a bottle of champagne though they were meant for midnight. 

“Why aren’t you dancing?” someone asked behind him as he poured himself a voluminous glass of champagne, and he turned around to face Mikey standing in the doorway. It was the exact same spot Joe had been standing in a few hours ago, suggesting early shot drinking, back when Pete hadn’t  had a clue that he would reunite with his old best friend before the night was over. It was kind of cool to think about, especially when drunk. 

“Couldn’t find a date for tonight. I’ll have to kiss another glass of booze when we hit the new year” he confessed and Mikey tilted his head. 

“Huh. I don’t have one either. Short notice, y’know. But booze sounds awesome” he smiled, and grabbed the champagne, not bothering with a glass but just taking a sip directly from the bottle. “You wanna go outside. There’s no one on the balcony, they’re all in here staring at the clock” 

“Yeah, yeah that’d be great” Pete agreed, bringing his glass as Mikey pushed through the narrow door that separated the kitchen from the balcony.

 

A few moments later, they were settled on each their cheap and fairly uncomfortable plastic garden chair, passing the champagne bottle between them, looking at the fireworks exploding above them and listening to the cheers of the party inside getting louder. 

“Isn’t it funny how everyone talks about ‘new year, new me’ and making changes and all that every new year’s, and then in the long run nothing has changed at all on January 1st” Pete asked, and Mikey looked over at him from his chair, cheeks a little colored in the cold wind, opposite his lips that were almost blue by now. 

“Nah, I think a lot changes. Not because it’s a new start, but because people think it is. It becomes more real when people believe in it, I think” Mikey replied, slowly and with a couple of dragged out pauses, like what he said required a lot of thought. 

“That sounds so smart, but I think I’m too drunk to understand it right now” Pete mumble, and then smiled over at Mikey. And then their sort of silence was broken by people yelling and laughing on the other side of the door, which was pretty much the sign that the clock had struck midnight and they were officially in January instead of December. 

“Fuck it” Mikey  then mumbled and got up from his chair, so fast that he almost fell over and Pete had to get up and grab his arm just to make sure Mikey didn’t fall over the railing of the balcony. 

“Fuck what?” Pete asked curiously. 

“Just, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and kiss you now, and if you think it’s a no-go then I’ll have to get you so drunk you won’t remember it tomorrow” he said, to his feet more than to Pete, and then he shot a quick glance into Petes eyes, and Pete only just had time to process how pretty Mikey actually was before his lips covered Petes mouth and it only took a couple of seconds from there, where Petes brain exploded in all different kinds of things he didn’t have to or wanted to think about right now, until hands founds hips and shoulders and Mikey let his tongue slide into Petes mouth, like that was how it was supposed to be and there weren’t a countless amount of people right on the other side of the glass door who probably was too busy with themselves to notice the two boys on the balcony, and like it was only them tonight, and then the fireworks that mirrored themselves in Petes chest as Mikey moved a little closer.

 

Mikey kissed like Pete would have expected, that be if he had ever thought about kissing Mikey, or Mikey kissing anyone, and he couldn’t remember ever doing that though he might have at some point. It didn’t matter, because Mikey kissed like Petes mouth was the only thing that kept him alive and he breathed through him and his bony fingers was rough on Petes skin and clenching his hoodie, but it was so _good_ , and so real and so _Mikey_. 

And he kept kissing like that for a long while. Pete didn’t know how long. He just knew that suddenly he couldn’t feel his feet and they’d probably both go down with pneumonia if they didn’t get warmer soon, and besides, people had quieted down a little inside too.

 

The party was still going strong though, but neither Pete nor Mikey felt like dancing or drinking anymore, the bottle of champagne was almost empty when they abandoned it on the floor of the balcony, so they just conquered the couch in the corner of Joes living room and sat really close there for another while. Mikey kept kissing Pete and Pete hoped to god that he’d remember it in the morning because it was some really damn intense kissing at Pete was totally up for doing it again in the morning if it was an opportunity.

 

At some point Patrick walked by, and Pete only vaguely registered his eye roll and dumb knowing smile because then Mikey was flicking his tongue across Mikeys bottom lip and that was really something that needed full attention. There was a time for everything, and Patrick mocking him definitely wasn’t for right now. Right now there was Mikey all up in his personal space, eyes a little unclear but still lit up with something that Pete definitely also felt inside his body right now, and his lips that were pink and wet and on Petes half the time, and it was just a really nice view, and Pete wondered how he’d managed to be an absolute hypersexual teenager, basically attached to Mikeys hip for a few years, and yet never really notice how Mikey had just been _there_ all the time, all attractive and kissable and totally good at said kissing.

But then again, maybe something had changed in the six years that had gone by, or maybe things had been exactly as still standing as he’d first thought, and it was really just a new year and a new start, where making out with Mikey was an option and if that was the case, drunk or not, it made a whole lot more sense to Pete that way. 

**Author's Note:**

> this was written mostly between 1 and 3 am on school nights because im dumb, so sorry for potential spelling mistakes or general lameness, hope you enjoy though bc i enjoyed writing B))


End file.
